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A lot happened in the world of golf over the weekend. Luke List beat Will Zalatoris in a playoff at the Farmers Insurance Open. Viktor Hovland beat Richard Bland in a playoff at the Dubai Desert Classic to move to No. 3 in the Official World Golf Rankings. Rory McIlroy missed a good opportunity to finish off his first Dubai win since 2015. Zalatoris' putting stroke got dissected like it was 8th-grade biology. Hovland compared his win to a practice match in college.

With everything flying fast on the weekend, I thought it would be necessary to go back through a few moments you may have missed and reset some of what we saw and thought about what happened at two pretty big events before moving on to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Saudi International later this week. Here are my thoughts on seven different moments from last week.

1. Saturday night finish at Farmers Insurance Open

It was one of the wisest (and most fun!) logistical moves on the PGA Tour in the last few years. Moving the Farmers Insurance Open to a Wednesday-Saturday event made the tournament feel a little off-kilter for the first two days, but the last two rounds absolutely rocked. Going up against NFL conference championship games is a fool's errand -- I'm unconvinced that any show or event in the history of television could thrive in a time slot opposite any NFL playoff games -- and all the parties involved (PGA Tour, Farmers Insurance Open and CBS Sports) got creative with an alternative solution. It was a solution that led to the awesome -- and also hilarious -- decision to have Jim Nantz crooning about golf from a snow-covered Arrowhead Stadium.

If you enjoyed the Wednesday-Saturday move, you're in luck, too. It sounds like this is something that's going to be around for a while with the Farmers falling on conference championship Sundays for the foreseeable future.

"The pro-am is an initial hit, but we can create things like a tee-off gala or other unique experiences to replace that financial impact," Farmers tournament director Marty Gorsich told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "All the other elements are fine. I don't see anything in our old format that says, 'We've got to get back to that.'"

Could this be a format that other tournaments might adopt? Perhaps I'm a prisoner of the moment these NFL playoffs are having, but the idea of golf finishing in primetime on Saturday night from the Hawaii swing through Super Bowl week -- which falls during the week of the Waste Management Phoenix Open before shifting back to a Sunday finish for the Genesis Invitational at Riviera -- is an absolute delight. There are challenges, for sure, but it would create such a unique viewer experience, tantamount to pushing college football games to Thursday evenings. You don't want to do them all like that, but to bump six weeks of the year into that time slot seems like an easy win.

"The golfers I talked to like it, too," Farmers Insurance CEO Jeff Dailey added. "I won't say who, but someone's prediction was that three or four more tournaments might shift their dates as well."

2. Will Zalatoris' trajectory

What should we make of Will Zalatoris? He doesn't have a PGA Tour win, but he does have two top 10s in a row to go with five others in 2021 -- including one pretty famous one at Augusta National. His ball-striking is tremendous, and mentally he's mature and adept. Even with how he talked about his playoff loss to List in the aftermath, it's obvious that he's clear-headed and self-aware about his game and the future.

"I want to go get next week, it's pretty simple," said Zalatoris. "I've got no regrets today at all. Like I said, I thought I battled like hell all day and handled myself really well. I had my chances, for sure, but that's just the nature of this game. It's hard to win out here, there's no question about that."

Statistically, Zalatoris is really intriguing. His loop-the-loop putting stroke got attention all week, and it certainly does not look that great or perform that well (he was No. 127 in putting percentage from 4-8 feet last season). On the flip side, he's a top-15 ball-striker in the world. If you look at the last 12 months, Zalatoris falls between Brooks Koepka and Tony Finau in ball-striking. Tremendous company, but maybe not good enough given the putting woes.

The part that worries me more than his hard-to-watch move at the ball is this: he has a low floor with his putter and also a low ceiling. The interesting comp here is the No. 2 player in the world, Collin Morikawa, who also has a low floor and low ceiling. They're ranked very similarly if you look at strokes gained putting in their 25 best rounds and 25 worst rounds over the last few years. Neither ranking is particularly great. This should actually be encouraging for Zalatoris given how much success Morikawa has had on Tour. The problem for Zalatoris if he wants to follow the Morikawa path is that Morikawa is a significantly better ball-striker than him (and also pretty much all humans in the world). An increase in distance off the tee for Zalatoris should help close that gap, and if it does, the putting is not so bad that he won't be able to contend, and potentially win, multiple times a year.

3. Endearing Viktor Hovland

If there's another top-10 player in his or her sport in the world right now more endearing than Viktor Hovland, I am unaware of this person. As has been pointed out repeatedly over the last few weeks, he is going to absolutely crush in golf's upcoming Netflix documentary. You can tell a lot about athletes when they're in new or uncomfortable situations, and Hovland could not come across as more likable in pretty much every instance just 30 months into his pro career. In some ways, it's strange to think of him as a professional athlete. When I think of the top three athletes in any given sport, I think of people who carry themselves with loads of swagger. Hovland is as unassuming as he is polite and genuine. Morikawa, who is ranked one spot ahead of him, is much of the same, but Hovland's presence seems to be less thought through, which results in it feeling more authentic. If news broke tomorrow that Hovland actually doesn't have an agent and will carry his own bag for the rest of the year, I honestly wouldn't be surprised. None of this is necessarily better or worse than how other top-10 players carry themselves, but it comes across so well in a modern sports world and makes him one of the easiest athletes in the world to root for.

In addition to apologizing to Bland's coach, who was interviewing Hovland after the round, he also had this hilarious exchange with the tournament organizers in Dubai.

And in addition to all of that, he compared running down a four-time major winner (Rory McIlroy) for $1.3 million to get to No. 3 in the world to beating his friends at Karsten Creek in Stillwater when he was still in college at Oklahoma State.

Reporter: Is that the best finish of your life?

Hovland: "Under the circumstances, yes, for sure"

Reporter: Can you expand?

Hovland: "I do distinctly remember a little match that I had in college. We used to do a little Ryder Cup -- me and Kristoffer Ventura against Zach Bauchou and Sam Stevens. It's just we were basically playing for dinner and it was kind of getting dark like this and it was pretty feisty. We all didn't want to lose and I remember we were doing stroke play best ball, I think, and they were down I think three strokes with three to go, and I finished birdie, birdie, and then eagle on the last to beat them by a shot and they were so mad, and it just brought me so much joy. So I do remember that one."

A match in college for cheese fries at Joe's is the comp for beating Rory McIlroy in the biggest win of his life!

4. Rory McIlroy's decision

Speaking of running down Rory, the two-time champion of this event finished par-bogey when he needed just par-par on a drivable par-4 and gettable par-5 to get into a playoff. It's a decision and a shot that have gotten a lot of attention over the last 24 hours. McIlroy didn't talk after the round, so we have no idea what was going through his mind, but two things came to mine as I considered his mini-collapse with the tournament in his hands with two holes to go.

1. He told me a story once -- and repeated it on his latest No Laying Up appearance -- about how difficult it is as you get older to maintain your innocence and to ignore all the places you could miss. How he wondered why Tiger Woods didn't just wallop driver all over the yard but now he understands why. Was that why he hit 3-wood on No. 18 instead of trying to turn over a driver with water way out in front of him? I have no idea. The 265 carry on his second shot was the most he had into No. 18 all week on that hole, so it did seem fairly conservative given how he'd played it the rest of the week.

2. There was a lot of "dude just doesn't close like he used to" talk in the aftermath. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but we very quickly forget the losses early in a player's career when we're reaching for some sort of nostalgic version of that person later on in life. McIlroy won twice on the PGA Tour in 2021 without his best stuff, and he's played terrific golf since the Ryder Cup. This feels a little bit like that stretch before the pandemic when everyone was like, "Rory can't hold a lead on a Sunday" before he ripped off four wins in six months, including a pressure-packed Players Championship victory. This is worth keeping track of, especially considering how he finished at the DP World Tour Championship (also known as the Ripped Shirt Invitational), but I always get wary of making too much out of one shot, one tournament or even one year when it comes to multi-decade careers like McIlroy's.

5. Tennis dominance

Rafa Nadal's Australian Open victory on Sunday reminded me that tennis' big three have now won 61 of the last 74 grand slam events. There's no run like that in golf, and I'm not sure there ever will be. In fact, I went back to look for something even close to similar, and the only thing that even comes close is the stretch from 1958-1978 in which Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Arnold Palmer won 31 of 84 major championships.

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Wikipedia

Not even close to the Nada-Federer-Djokovic tennis dominance, but still a pretty impressive stretch. More than anything, I think this speaks to the fact that it's so much harder to win a golf tournament over 155 other players over the course of 72 holes in which you cannot defend what they're doing than it is to win seven matches against seven different guys over the course of two weeks. That doesn't make one better or worse, but it does make one a much more difficult proposition.

6. Normal sport at Torrey Pines

We got a fun "this is a very normal sport" moment at Torrey Pines on Saturday night when a rules official was called in to look at grains of sand around Zalatoris' ball after List, whose ball ended up about 4 inches from his in a fairway bunker, blasted out and sprayed sand all over the rest of the bunker as well as Zalatoris' ball.

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List's caddie and the rules official both handled a rake around the ball with the deftness of a bomb diffuser, but the images certainly had that "imagine this happening in another sport!" vibe.

7. Lowry-Fleetwood video

This hole-in-one contest the DP World Tour put out between Shane Lowry and Tommy Fleetwood in which they were given 100 shots to make one ace is compelling and a reminder that simple, well-executed ideas with the right people are undefeated